In glancing over the productions of Chaldæo-Assyrian armourers, jewellers, workers in metal, cabinetmakers, turners, &c., we shall, then, feel no surprise at the introduction and skilful treatment of animals and parts of animals, for we have already shown that the Assyrian sculptors were, perhaps, the foremost animaliers of all antiquity. On the other hand, in the whole of those objects which have taught us some of the favourite motives of the Assyrian ornamentist, we have hardly encountered a human figure; at the most we can only point to one or two objects on which it was used. In the throne of Sennacherib (see above, Fig. 47) it was in reality no more than a symbol. It was not introduced for its own sake, but in order to suggest a particular idea to the mind of the spectator. And as for the earrings moulded into the shape of a child (Figs. 251 and 252), we are not at all sure that they belong to the place and period to which they are ascribed.
But although we are met on all sides by animals and by fragments from their bodies, by serpents, rams, goats, bulls, lions (most frequent of all), griffins and other fictitious monsters, we are distressed by the absence of those figures of men, still more of women, which occur so continually on the articles of furniture, on the domestic utensils, on the metal vases and the jewelry of the Egyptians. Wearied by the very wealth of an art so rich and so marvellously inventive, we have given, perhaps, in our volumes upon Egypt, examples too few and chosen from an insufficient number of classes; but our readers cannot have forgotten the graceful girlish forms carved on the handles of the perfume spoons, here stepping delicately among the stems of papyrus, there with their slender limbs extended like those of a swimmer.[461] We may be allowed, perhaps, to refresh the memories of readers who have dwelt so long with us in Assyria, by placing before them two more examples from the marvellous art wealth of the Nile valley (Figs. 260 and 261).
These two examples do not belong to the same class as the perfume spoons, but their ruling idea is the same. They are mirrors with bronze handles. In both cases these handles are modelled in the shape of nude women or young girls, the slender proportions recalling the sculptures and paintings of the New Empire. In the first the right arm hangs by the side while the left is crossed upon the chest; the head alone, protected by the thick hair or wig, supports the mirror (Fig. 260). In the second both arms are raised as high as the shoulders and the hands bent upwards from the wrists to meet a depressed cross-piece to which the polished disk is attached (Fig. 261). In both cases the modelling of limbs and torso is a little dry and summary; but the motive is well imagined, and in spite of defects in detail the whole is characterized by style and grace.
Nothing of the kind has been found, or, to all appearance, will ever be found, in the goldsmith’s work of Babylon and Nineveh. As new excavations are made, we shall, no doubt, find new arrangements, but it is very unlikely that anything yet to be discovered can essentially modify the idea we have been led to form of the tastes and habits of Mesopotamian industry. We are sufficiently familiar with Chaldæo-Assyrian sculpture, both in its strength and its weakness, to thoroughly understand the gaps which must always have existed in the storehouse to which the artizan went for his ideas. The artizan followed the example of the sculptor; he gave his attention to the bas-relief and it repaid his trouble. Among the figures sprinkled with so lavish a hand over stone and wood, ivory and metal, some were traced with the point or engraved in intaglio; others were beaten up with the hammer or chisel so as to stand in gentle salience above their bed. But, speaking generally, no attempt was made to model the nude figures of men or women in the round. No suspicion of the wealth of suggestion latent especially in the latter, seems to have dawned upon the Assyrian mind. If we except a few terra-cotta statuettes, the artist who in some way gave proof of so much resource, of so much skill and ingenuity, seems never to have felt the charm of female beauty. The beauty of woman is the light of nature, the perennial joy of the eye; to exclude it from the ideal world created by the plastic arts is to condemn that world to a perpetual twilight, to cast over it a veil of chill monotony and sadness.
Fig. 261.—Egyptian mirror, actual size. Louvre. Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier.
In the arts of all those peoples who received the teachings of Egypt and Chaldæa, whether at first hand, like the Phœnicians, or at second, like the Greeks, the two distinct influences can always be traced. Mesopotamia may be recognized in certain ornamental motives, such as the “knop and flower,” the rosettes and palmettes, as well as in its taste for the symmetry given by coupled figures; still more clearly is it betrayed in motives into which lions and the whole tribe of fantastic animals are introduced, struggling with and devouring each other, and occasionally brought to the ground by some individual dressed in a long gaberdine and crowned with a tiara.
On the other hand, it is to Egypt that our thoughts are turned when the human body meets our eyes in its unveiled nobility, with all the variety of attitude and outline its forms imply. The peoples of Western Asia learnt much in the school of the Chaldæan artist, but the teaching given by the Egyptian sculptor was of a higher order, and far better adapted to guide them in the way that leads to those exquisite creations in which delicacy and certainty of hand are happily allied with imaginative power. Sooner or later such teaching must have aroused, in open and inquiring minds, a feeling for beauty like that felt in her peculiar fashion by Egypt, a feeling to which Greece, when once put in her right way, gave the fullest expression it has ever received in marble and bronze.
In order to make good a comparison that no historian of art can avoid, we have placed ourselves successively at two different points of view, and from both we have arrived at the same result: as artists the Egyptians take a higher rank than the Assyrians, than those constructors who obstinately neglected the column even when they built with stone, than those sculptors who avoided measuring themselves with nature, and who shirked her difficulties by draping their figures. But before thus bringing the two methods and the two ways of looking at form into opposition, we ought perhaps to have pointed out a difference in which this inequality is foreshadowed. In all the monarchies of the East the great monuments were anonymous, or, at least, if a name was given in the official texts it was not that of the artist who conceived them, but of the king under whom they were created. It is not till we arrive at Greece that we find public opinion placing the work of art and its author so high that the latter feels himself justified in signing his own creation. But although this practice was not inaugurated in Egypt, numerous inscriptions bear witness to the high rank held in Egyptian society by the artists to whom the king confided the construction and decoration of his buildings.[462] These men were not only well paid; they received honours which they are careful to record, and their fame was spread over the whole valley of the Nile. In the cuneiform texts we have so far failed to discover the name of a single architect or sculptor, and it does not appear that a reason for the omission is to be sought in the peculiar conditions of Chaldæo-Assyrian epigraphy. Although Babylon and Nineveh have not left us thousands of epitaphs like those rescued from the sands of Egypt, we possess many private contracts and agreements in which information similar to that afforded in other countries by the sepulchral steles is to be found. Neither there nor elsewhere do we find a trace of anything corresponding to the conspicuous rank held under the Theban princes of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties, by a Semnat, a Bakhenkhonsou, or any other of the royal architects whose names have been handed down to us in the texts.
It is unlikely that this difference will vanish when more texts have been translated. The inequality in the position of the two artists is readily explained by the unequal development of the two arts. Egyptian architecture is learned and skilful after a fashion quite distinct from that of Mesopotamia. It is not content, like the latter, to spread itself out laterally and to heap up huge masses of earth, to be afterwards clothed in thin robes of enamelled faïence, of painted and sculptured alabaster. In spite of their rich decorations, palaces like those of Nimroud and Khorsabad never quite threw off their appearance of gigantic improvisations. Their plans once determined—and Assyrian plans only varied within very narrow limits—the method of roofing, flat or vaulted, fixed upon for each apartment, all the rest was only a matter of foremen and their legions of half-skilled workmen. At the very least we may say that the architect who superintended the building of a Ninevite palace had a far easier task than his rival of Thebes or Memphis. The arrangement of porticoes and hypostyle halls demanded much thought and taste, and, if the work when finished was at all to come up to the ideas of its creator, the workmen who cut the graceful capitals and sturdy architraves from the huge masses of granite, sandstone, or limestone, had to be supervised with an unremitting care unknown and uncalled for in Mesopotamia. The architects who raised the colonnades of Karnak and the Ramesseum for Seti and his famous son, were the Ictinus and Mnesicles of the East. We may become better acquainted than we are now with the monumental history of Mesopotamia, but we shall never find within her borders artists worthy to be placed on a level with those Theban masters.